I remember supporting Larry Lessig back when losing supreme court cases was his thing. I forked over cash for his complete failure of an anti-PAC—and urged others to do the same.

Larry has always loved to talk—and talk, and talk, and talk—about how he and his team are going to out-think the opposition. How they will cleverly use the system against itself. Now he has come right out and said he’s found a “hack” to fix what’s broken.

And finally, after all this time, I see the problem. Lessig is a law hacker. He has an undying belief that, like the protagonist in some cyberpunk novel, he’s going to find the hidden backdoor that lets him piggyback his own code onto society’s signal and “fix” the “bug” once and for all.

It’s an attractive narrative to any hacker. But it’s never going to work, and it shouldn’t work. Because the “bug” is people being people and allowing power to accumulate the way we always have. We’re not going to “hack” that out of the system with just some new laws. Reform is needed, yes, but only a candidate who intends to win (aka: be an attractive and relatable person, rather than a superior ivory-tower gadfly) will have the support to push those reforms through.